Digital & Content Marketing Success Story

Interview with Angelica (watch video part I)
Introduction to the journey to get from ZERO to 90k followers in 3 months

The social media platform TikTok has gained unprecedented traction during this lockdown season. This new phenomenon has seen millions of users from all over the globe uploading short-duration videos for the world’s viewing pleasure. The main aim of TikTok is supposedly to ‘inspire creativity and bring joy’.

In this case study, Stephen Humphrey, who is the subject matter expert at MMC, investigates and discusses the success story of TikTok influencer Angelica Siciliani Fendi who has enjoyed newfound fame from TikTok.

Read key points and video transcript

Angelica is a graduate in business management from King’s College in London. She then specialised in strategic marketing from Imperial College. She was going down the traditional route as a recent graduate and began to apply for graduate schemes. But with the rise of COVID-19, most graduate schemes were cancelled and this left Angelica looking for other opportunities.

Angelica witnessed the exponential growth of TikTok and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the platform which would aid her professional development.

Marketing is an ever-changing industry; therefore, to be successful in marketing, one must always stay up to date with the latest trends. Angelica was advised to look into TikTok from her PR guru. She began playing around with the platform for a month before actually looking into what she could do with it.

One morning, Angelica woke up and was shocked to see that her follower count increased from 150 to 10,000. This 66-fold increase was due to one of her videos going viral. Angelica recalls how she nearly had a panic account and was about to cancel her account. Luckily for her, she did not go ahead with the cancellation. Instead, she processed the information and used it to her advantage.

Angelica states that to be successful in TikTok, the account must fulfil a niche. She believes her success was due to her understanding her niche in the market and then capitalising on this. Angelica advises that a TikTok account should ideally focus on one particular thing. A TikTok account holder should ideally upload videos daily due to algorithms penalising users for not uploading for a few days.

Angelica had another big increase in her follower count when she jumped from 50k to 70k within the space of a day. However, since then, her growth has been progressive. This is due to the algorithms changing.

Due to the ongoing issues with TikTok and the privacy issue that the company has been facing in the US, the company has had to make major changes which has affected the algorithm. This may lead to accounts having significantly less views and likes one week as opposed to the previous week. But the aim of the game is to adapt to the algorithms and to develop this attitude of always anticipating change.